All the Americans in the film are mad, from the top officers down to the lowest degrees. But Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) seems to be the only one who is aware of that fact.

The Vietnam War is still a mystery in a certain way. The war took eleven years and the most advanced superpower, the United States of America, was unable to defeat a small third world country, what was just a former French colony and an unimportant rural country. Although Vietnam was supported by the Sowjetunion with weapons, it couldn't stand a real American attack on it's center, Hanoi. Hanoi is situated in a delta near the South Chinese Sea in the Gulf of Tonking. The Americans dominated this Sea area with their air carreers and attacked Vietnam from there (as well as from Thailand) by air raids. Why didn't they invade the area and conquered Hanoi to finish the war?

October 2011

Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now describes the journey on an American patrol boat upwards a river in Vietnam and later Cambodia. It's the year 1969 and the mission is to assassinate a renegate US officer who stays anywhere in a remote jungle camp. The whole trip is allegoric for the Vietnam War, how crazy, brutal and futile it was. The movie has much of a dream, better spoken a nightmare and leads the viewer into the depths of state organized disaster and the resulting outbreak of the worst of what the human soul contains. Real war is even much worse than what is shown here, but it still gives a remarkable insight.

Image: de.wikipedia.org

The story is based on Joseph Conrad's 19th century novel "Heart of Darkness", a story about the cruelties of colonialism, and adapts it to the brutalities of post-colonialism as it is nowadays. There is still no end of this kind of wars. Many of them were led in Latin America, Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (from 2001 on), Irak (2003) and it's yet latest example in Lybia (2011).